Stewart Patrick
On February 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order with the potential to upend decades of American global engagement. The directive mandates a comprehensive review within 180 days of all current multilateral organizations of which the United States is a member and all international treaties to which it is party. The explicit purpose of this exercise is to determine whether such support should be withdrawn. The clock is thus ticking on a distinctive and momentous aspect of post-1945 American internationalism: the strategic decision by successive Republican and Democratic administrations to embed U.S. power in multilateral institutions designed to support a peaceful, prosperous, and just world and to facilitate cooperation on shared global problems.
The immediate targets are narrow and unsurprising. The order declares that the United States will withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council, as it did during Trump’s first term; reconsider membership in UNESCO, a long-standing target of Republicans; and cease all funding for the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees.
Of far greater import is the order’s decree that the secretary of state shall review “all international organizations” of which the United States is a member and “all conventions and treaties” to which it is party, to determine whether these “are contrary to the interests of the United States and whether [they] can be reformed.” The secretary will then recommend to the president “whether the United States should withdraw” from those commitments. In principle, the directive could lead to a U.S. abrogation of thousands of treaties and a departure from hundreds of multilateral organizations.
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